Telling a Better Story

Reimagining How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age

Joshua D. Chatraw

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780310108641
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Christianity Today 2021 Book Award Winner: Apologetics & Evangelism

Telling a Better Story clears a path to a more effective, empathetic apologetics for today—both for experienced apologists and those new to sharing their faith with others.

Today's Christians often view the practice of defending their faith as pushy or unnecessary. Won't it just be taken for proselytizing? Don't many unbelievers find it offensive? Many Christians have shifted to a strategy of hoping that our lives will show Christ to our neighbors—and, while this is certainly good, it's no substitute to actively telling people about Christ.

In Telling a Better Story, author Joshua Chatraw presents a new and refreshing way to engage in apologetics that will help you tell the story of Christ in a holistic, culturally-contextual manner that—while being respectful—helps unbelievers imagine a more complete happiness and a better meaning to life.

Telling a Better Story will give you the tools to:

• Understand the cultural stories that surround us.
• Recognize how these secular stories have shaped the way many people think.
• Learn how to tell God's story in a fresh way that allows today's younger generations to see it as a more meaningful and more hopeful story than the scripts around it.

Finally, you'll also learn how to deal with the perennial issues and common objections to Christianity.

PART
1

A Better Story about Apologetics

chapter
1

In Search of a Better Way

Once upon a time, our descendants gathered around campfires and told stories to explain the world. By passing down primitive tales, they gave each other myths to provide meaning and direction in life. That was then. But now we’ve come of age. Science, reason, and technology have freed us from the captivity of such enchanted fairy tales. We now have our computers, algorithms, and common-sense reason as our guides to live better lives and to make a better world.¹

Or so we’re told.

The problem with this “anti-story” tale is that no one escapes the need for stories. We may invent new technology, but we aren’t doing away with them. We are just inventing new mediums by which to pass them down. The likes of Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube have replaced our sage elders around the campfire, but the stories are still being told. Our big, life-explaining stories (often called metanarratives) are communicated through a myriad of smaller stories we hear and tell each day, and they frame how we live and answer the big questions of life. Who are we? What is the meaning of life? What is the fundamental problem, and how can it be fixed? Is there reason to have hope?

THE NEED TO LISTEN CLOSELY

Christians should pay close attention to how, even in the most “enlightened” modern cultures, our novels and movies remind us of the human hunger for something beyond this world. Tim Keller recounts how prior to the release of the first Lord of the Rings movie, “there was a host of articles by literary critics and other cultural elites lamenting the popular appeal of fantasies, myths, and legends, so many of which (in their thinking) promoted regressive views. Modern people are supposed to be more realistic. We should realize that things are not black and white but gray, that happy endings are cruel because life is not like that.”²

He cites an article in The New Yorker that chides fans of Tolkien’s novel: “It is a book that bristles with bravado, and yet to give in to it—to cave in to it [to really enjoy it] as most of us did on a first reading—betrays . . . a reluctance to face the finer shades of life, that verges on the cowardly.”³ Yet despite such calls for “realism,” we can’t seem to help ourselves. The popularity of Stranger Things and Marvel superhero movies, as well as the intergenerational Star Wars craze, reveals that it is not just “realistic” narratives we crave. As Alan Jacobs observes, the love of such fantastical stories and a fascination with the paranormal aren’t signs that this story of enlightened disenchantment has failed to color the lenses by which we view the world, but that it generally has—“and sometimes we hate it.”⁴ It’s as if we have inherited glasses that screen out the vision of an otherworldly hope to supposedly give us a view of “how it really is,” and yet something deep inside us can’t help but long to continue the search.

We live in an age where people imagine they have cast off ancient but erroneous wisdom for the wisdom of modern ideals. Our world is now one where “what you see is what you get,” and thus personal freedom and self-expression have become salvific ends. Consumerism and pop psychotherapy are the means. And yet, as we will see later, our modern scripts have often not worked out so well for us. The pursuit of individual freedom has meant losing true love. Consumerism has led to despair. And our pop psychology has removed neither our guilt nor our anger. And with the loss of a traditional understanding of sin, we’ve also lost the resources needed to truly forgive and find peace with one another. The cultural narratives that promised heaven on earth have instead led us to a very different place.

Something’s missing. There is a shallowness that gnaws away at the fleeting happiness these narratives offer. The realities of life have a way of applying such pressure that at times even the cynic can’t help but peer into the secular crevasses beneath his feet. People can’t help but feel the existential angst when the script they’ve assumed begins to break down. “But what other story is there?”

Don’t assume that those who begin to look for a better story or even resist modernity’s disenchanted version of the world—peeking over the edge and wondering, Maybe there is another story that makes better sense?—will automatically turn to Christianity. They might dabble in new spiritual quests out of curiosity in the search for something more, or maybe just for the novelty of it.⁵ At times, people unsatisfied with the loss of transcendence reach for a vague “invent it yourself” spirituality that calls for little to no sacrifice, no final judgment, and no real inconvenience to modern sensibilities, all the while promising your best life now. (They might even mistakenly think this is Christianity!) No matter which option is selected, to remain in a reductionistic mechanical world or one of the reactionary cafeteria-style “spiritual” choices, Christianity often still seems implausible.

While the perspective of our Christian ancestors and their common-sense, “can’t imagine it otherwise” belief in an enchanted world and divine accountability seems a long way from today, one piece of good news is that stories haven’t gone out of style. For all our cultural distance, we’re still gathering to tell stories and to be shaped by them. We attempt to explain the world through story. And the stories we tell turn around and explain us.⁶ Consequently, even when a culture seems to have abandoned the gospel, they haven’t abandoned story. They can’t. Stories, both big worldview stories that remain unarticulated by many and the small micro-stories we interact with in our daily lives, provide a way into their world—and a bridge into sharing God’s story.

This book is about engaging the deepest aspirations of our secular friends and asking them to consider how the story of the gospel, as strange as may seem to them at first, just may lead them to what their heart has been looking for all along. This, of course, will mean asking them to do some thinking (and us doing some thinking and rethinking of our own), as well as challenging them to be as critical with their unbelief as they are with the possibility of belief. This also will mean coming alongside others, not with a posture of opposition, but rather with a posture of invitation: “Come, taste and see.”

IN DESPERATE NEED OF HOPE

As I was completing this book, a friend’s younger brother died unexpectedly. By the time I caught up with my friend by phone, a week had passed. He was still grieving, but I was also surprised by how he was processing the tragedy. I could hear a hopeful confidence in his voice. I knew that for the last five or six years, he had been maturing in his faith. And in talking with him, my own spirit was lifted as we reflected on the love of God, the resurrection of our Savior, and the life to come.

His brother’s death pressed home a sense of urgency about the salvation of his loved ones. While the brother who had passed away was a believer, another brother remained a skeptic. Over the past week, he had watched his brother grieve without any hope. My friend had invited his brother to accompany him to church numerous times over the past years with little success. He had shared the gospel with him, but had seen no response.

This brother had grown up attending church but had grown increasingly cynical in graduate school, and Christianity seemed far-fetched. My friend had given him a popular apologetic book that made traditional arguments in support of Christianity in the hope that they could discuss the book together, but it didn’t get any traction. It quickly became clear that the popular apologetic “moves” that had been suggested for reaching his brother just weren’t going to work.

As he described his frustration to me, my friend confessed that he didn’t want to argue with his brother; he simply wanted to talk, to have conversations that might lead him out of his skepticism. As I listened, I couldn’t help but smile at the Lord’s timing, realizing that this book was written for the need my friend had shared. Like many believers today, he needed a way to winsomely communicate the gospel to people shaped by a culture that is in desperate need of hope, yet skeptical of religious faith.

A CHALLENGE FOR EVANGELISM

Until recently, most outreach strategies have focused on verbally sharing the gospel, getting unbelievers to attend an evangelistic event, being able to answer basic intellectual questions, yet still assuming that unbelievers understood and shared a common framework for considering religious claims. This approach worked when we lived in a culturally Christian society—the context in which most of our past outreach strategies were developed. Christianity was seen as a cultural good, something that helped society flourish and function well. “Good” people went to church. Attending religious events such as revivals or church services—the primary vehicles for the Christian message—was both implicitly and explicitly encouraged. Our society had a general respect for religion, so you could stick to inviting people to church, passing down our faith to our own kids by teaching them the Bible, and occasionally sending someone to the “experts” when a hard question arose.

If you haven’t noticed, things have changed. Today, there is a growing social sentiment that discourages people from attending “churchy“ events or even seriously considering the Christian message. But why is this so?

A shift has occurred in Western culture. Not only is God absent from the fabric of our most important institutions and cultural centers, but an array of competing views about life’s most important questions are available to the public. Religious belief is simply one option among many—and an increasing number see it as a strange one at that.⁷ More than just disagreements over minor details, it increasingly feels like we aren’t even in the same ballpark on our thinking about the most important questions of life. One only needs to spend a few minutes on social media to see that what seems like “common sense” to one group may sound like lunacy to another. We may use similar vocabulary, but buried beneath our disagreements are different assumptions about life and its meaning and purpose, about reason and morality. People have so many misunderstandings, critiques, and fears about Christianity, it’s hard to even know where to begin.

In addition to the challenge of effective communication within this context, the attempt itself to convert is often seen as morally questionable because it requires telling people that their very identities must change (and, of course, in an important sense, they are right!). It’s fine to say that Christianity works for you personally, but claiming that Christianity is the only way is exclusive and intolerant. A private faith may be a good thing for you personally (as long as you’re not too extreme about it), but calling for someone else to change their religious views is intolerant, if not dehumanizing (“This is who I am!”). Such a cultural climate can lead to strange looks when we invite our secular friends to church and awkward conversations when we share Christ. If we’re honest, we can easily be tempted to keep our faith to ourselves.

As we find ourselves in an increasingly post-Christian culture, approaches that assume people will come to hear a famous speaker (for example, traditional revivals) will be largely ineffective in this environment. People aren’t waiting around for a relationship with God or for their “sins” to be divinely forgiven—something that most of the standard evangelistic programs of the last fifty years assumed.

Yet we need to keep things in perspective. This is not the first time the church has faced such challenges. Larry Hurtado, who specialized in early Christianity, provided a helpful summary on the early church’s place within culture:

Early Christianity of the first three centuries was a different, even distinctive, kind of religious movement in the cafeteria of religious options of the time . . . In the eyes of many in the Roman era, Christianity was very odd, even objectionably so . . . Even among those who took the time to acquaint themselves more accurately with Christian beliefs, practices, and text, the response was often intensely negative.⁸

It’s striking how similar their situation was to ours today. In order to meet the challenges of modern pluralism, we would do well to learn from our beginnings. The church was born in a pluralistic society with little to no acce...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1: A Better Story About Apologetics
• Part 2: Offering a Better Story
• Part 3: Objections to the Story
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments